Sue Darby, MOS

At one point in my life I had come to a crossroads. One portion of my life was ending and another just starting. Overwhelmed by the number of tasks on my “Never ending to do list” I broke it out into a 10 page Battle Plan.

I had just started at Nine Star Education & Employment as a Career Development Mentor & Computer Instructor. My first morning I was updating my plan and my new boss walked past and became intrigued by what he saw on screen and asked me to do the morning workshop. That morning, not having any other pre-prepared materials 6 copies of my personal plan went to clients.

I spoke from the heart in my first speaking gig professionally. I outlined what I needed to accomplish and wanted to accomplish and what I had already done.

Over the coming months I would re-write it into what you see in the flash below for public consumption. Each month I updated what I had done and expand my presentation and after 2 years of Americorps I was able to cross off many items on it and “toot my horn” on how it worked. This inspired several clients who also wrote their own versions and came back to tell me that it did work.

While I no longer work for Nine Star I know for a fact that my Battle Plan is a regular workshop given by my former bosses and passed on to clients and others.

I have since moved on to creating even more specific Battle Plans for projects in my life. I have one for my websites & businesses, one for my children, one for buying a house (completed in 2010) and my personal one.

If you find that this idea is of use to you, wonderful. Please let me know as I love knowing that my ideas inspired others.

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Sue Darby, BS Business, MOS
Certificate in Fashion Design
Microsoft Office Master Certified
Alpha Beta Kappa Honors Society
Business Owner & Webmistress

I use many systems to try to keep everything straight in my life. I have my now 5 year old Palm Tungsten E, my Circa notebooks with custom pages, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Bookmarks, Power Point, OneNote and my precious Gmail. I use Outlook at work to organize my meetings and other to do’s that are specifically work related.

My Tungsten E is my “other brain” I put my to do’s, shopping lists and long term goal steps in it. Every week or so I bring it out and start checking stuff off and take pride in the shrinking of my list until I start adding to it again…. the Palm holds my “never ending to do list”. Without it I am lost.

For weekly and daily must dos that have deadlines I have my Circa notebooks. I have to give credit to my friend Stacy who got me hooked on the system which I used extensively in my last year of college to organize my term papers and project notes. The customization and expandability of the system is amazing. Unlike a 3 ring system where if a hole breaks or the paper wears out the Circa system can keep going without having to repair the paper. I have designed several pages and it took a while to get a daily and weekly planning page I really like and use. I have various size, shape and description pages and notebooks and the scrap paper that I tend to grab for a quick note can be put in a notebook too. While I like the Levenger site and the selection I found that Rollabind beats them for prices on some things. If you’re thinking of trying to find another system to use to organize I would recommend the Ring bound type system.

I am constantly on the go and using many computers and just love the portability of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Bookmarks and Gmail. I have access to some of the most important things that normally reside on a flash drive which can be forgotten or lost or corrupt easily, right at my fingertips as long as I have internet. I normally have net access so there’s no problem with not getting to things. I use Docs & Spreadsheets to have access to many of my most common business files and specific to do lists or project plans even. I have PDFs of how to books and even copies of some of my non-sensitive financial information in Docs. I also used it for gathering research for term papers and keeping tabs on favorite sites for projects.

Google Bookmarks is incredibly useful to me as I use both Windows and Linux at home and FireFox, Opera, Safari & Crome on the same system. With Google Bookmarks I can get to my favorites from any of the browsers and in either OS. I am also on a couple different computers at work and can get to my work favorites from either system by using the single online system. Best part is that if my computer crashes.. any of them… I can get to my bookmark sites and continue working quickly.

My Gmail is my home… I love my Gmail. I have my incoming mail from several addresses filtered and forwarded to Gmail and then tagged so that I can find what I want. There have been days where I’ve needed a user ID for a site or a password and been able to search my mail… several years of mail using Gmail’s quick system. I’ve tried some of the plugins which have helped and discarded others but basic Gmail comes through. I also use the chat to talk to people discussing things with my out of state family and saving on phone bills or finding out what was needed at home for dinner to be made.

PowerPoint is my long term goal planner or as I aptly named one of my plans “Battle Plan”. I regularly create a “Battle Plan” for large goals everything form planning a website to buying a house to what I want to accomplish in X years. PowerPoint lets me break the mega goals down into the various areas of my life and then further break down those areas into mini goals and finally into baby steps that I can do on a daily basis. It’s great to say I accomplished everything on my original “Battle Plan” from 2006 just last month… the last thing was cross the stage and graduate college with honors. I’ve had to go on to modify my battle plans since and need to continue to do so.

Last but not least, is OneNote. I use OneNote to divide up a Master To Do List into bite size pieces also but it tracks resources needed for each project as well as what has to be done. I like this system but am not as consistent with it as I could be perhaps it’s because I use so many other systems.

I will explore and post more about how my systems work for me and even examples of some of my worksheets and ways of keeping it all straight. I may even at some point eliminate some of my systems in an effort to simplify.

Sue Darby, BS Business, MOS
Certificate in Fashion Design
Microsoft Office Master Certified
Alpha Beta Kappa Honors Society
Business Owner & Webmistress